Protestant Episcopal Church Mission
After this version of the DFMS proved to have little appeal, the 1835 General Convention took the major step of amending the DFMS constitution to read, “The Society shall be considered as comprehending all persons who are members of this Church.”[2] Although solving the membership problem, this change had a strong theological motivation, as expressed at the time by George Washington Doane, bishop of New Jersey, to the DFMS directors: In an address of great power, he argued "that by the original constitution of Christ, the Church as the Church, was the one great Missionary Society; and the Apostles, and the Bishops, their successors, his perpetual trustees; and this great trust could not, and should never be divided or deputed."Creating the office of Missionary Bishop, a senior ordained clergyman sent to establish the church in a particular area, was the third major contribution of the 1835 General Convention.Jackson Kemper (now commemorated in the Episcopal calendar on 24 May) was consecrated at convention as the first missionary bishop, and through his constant travels he laid the foundations of the Church in Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas.Speedily, boarding and day schools were established, a medical hospital opened, and Dr. Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky was set apart to prepare a new version of the Bible, in the Mandarin dialect, which he completed in 1875.[6] An extraordinary missionary bishop was Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, whose story (commemorated on 14 October) illustrates both remarkable mission achievement and the appeal of Anglicanism to pilgrims whose journey is cosmopolitan and inter-religious.Responding to Boone's call for helpers in China, he learned to write Chinese on board ship across the Pacific and translated the Bible and parts of the prayerbook into Mandarin before he was elected bishop of Shanghai in 1877.Paralyzed by a stroke, he resigned his see in 1883 but over the next twenty years completed, with the help of his wife, a translation of the Bible into Wenli (classical Chinese), typing some 2,000 pages with the middle finger of his partially crippled hand.